Michael Sadler on the Need for Factory Reform, 1832
(After the failure of the 1831 Bill, the factory reformers turned to Michael Thomas Sadler (1780-1835). Sadler, a Leeds linen merchant, was a High Tory and devout Anglican. Sadler was a severe critic of the liberal economics that he believed provided support for laissez faire and opposition to factory reform. Previously a Tory representative from the boroughs of Newark and Aldborough, he was the prospective Conservative candidate for Leeds in 1832 when he gave this speech on factory reform on 16 March 1832. He was defeated at Leeds by opponents of factory reform. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Michael Thomas Sadler, M.P., F.R.S., &c., 1842, 337-379; in J. T. Ward, ed., The Factory System, Vol. .II, Birth and Growth (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), pp. 99-102.)
The bill which I now implore the House to sanction with its authority, has for its object the liberation of children and other young persons employed in the mills and factories of the United Kingdom, from that over‑exertion and long confinement, which common sense, as well as experience, has shown to be utterly inconsistent with the improvement of their minds, the preservation of their morals, and the maintenance of their health; ‑in a word, to rescue them from a state of suffering and degradation, which it is conceived that the children of the industrious classes in hardly any other country have ever endured.
... the boasted freedom of our labourers in many pursuits will, on a just view of their condition, be found little more than a name. Those who argue the question upon mere abstract principles seem, in my apprehension, too much to forget the conditions of society: the unequal division of property or rather its total monopoly by the few, leaving the many nothing but what they can obtain by their daily labour; which very labour cannot become available for the purposes of daily subsistence without the consent of those who own the property of the community ... the employer and the employed do not meet on equal terms in the market of labour; on the contrary, the latter, whatever his age and call him as free as you please, is often almost entirely at the mercy of the former‑he would be wholly so were it not for the operation of the Poor Laws, which are palpable interference with the market of labour, and condemned as such by their opponents ... In a word, wealth, still more than knowledge, is power; and power, liable to abuse wherever vested, is least of all free from tyrannical exercise, when it owes its existence to a sordid source. Hence have all laws, human or divine, attempted to protect the labourer from the injustice and cruelty which are too often practised upon him ...
Our ancestors could not have supposed it possible‑posterity will not believe it true‑it will be placed among the historic doubts of some future antiquary‑that a generation of Englishmen could exist, or had existed, that would labour lisping infancy, of a few summers old, regardless alike of its smiles or tears, and unmoved by its unresisting weakness, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, and through the weary night also, till, in the dewy morn of existence, the bud of youth faded, and fell ere it was unfolded. Oh, cursed lust of gold! Oh, the guilt which England is contracting in the kindling eye of Heaven, when nothing but exultations are heard about the perfection of her machinery, the march of her manufactures, and the rapid increase of her wealth and prosperity! ...
... Sir, children are beaten with thongs, prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children or grown‑ up‑I hardly know which is the more disgusting outrage‑are beaten upon the face, arms, and bosom‑beaten in your free market of labour, as you term it, like slaves. These are the instruments. [Here the honourable member exhibited some black, heavy, leathern thongs, one of them fixed in a sort of handle, the smack of which, when struck upon the table, resounded through the House.] They are quite equal to breaking an arm, but the bones of the young are, as I have before said, pliant. The marks, however, of the thong are long visible, and the poor wretch is flogged before its companions‑flogged, I say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the cart‑whip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling rise against the factory thong of England ... Sir, I should wish to propose an additional clause to this bill, enacting that the overseer who dares to lay the lash on the almost naked body of the child shall be sentenced to the tread‑wheel for a month, and it would be but right if the master who knowingly tolerates the infliction of this cruelty on abused infancy, this insult upon parental feeling, this disgrace upon the national character, should bear him company, though he roll to tile house of correction in his chariot ... The great increase of debauchery of another kind, it would be absurd to deny; I never did hear it denied, that many of the mills, at least those in which night‑working is pursued, are, in this respect, little better than brothels . . .
The principal features of this bill for regulating the labour of children and other young persons in mills and factories, are these:‑First, to prohibit the labour of infants therein under tile age of nine years; to limit the actual work, from nine to eighteen years of age, to ten hours daily, exclusive of the time allowed for meals and refreshment, with an abatement of two hours on the Saturday, as a necessary preparation for the Sabbath; and to forbid all night‑work under the age of twenty‑one.
…... I compare not the English child with the African child; but I ask this House, and his Majesty's Government, whether it would not be right and becoming to consider the English child as favourably as the African adult? You have limited the labour of the robust negro to nine hours; but when I propose that the labour of the young white slave shall not exceed ten, the proposition is deemed extravagant ...
………………Another objection of some of the opposing mill owners I will briefly notice. They cannot consent, forsooth, to an abridgement of the long and slavish hours of infant labour because of the Corn Laws. Why, these individuals‑some or them not originally, perhaps, of the most opulent class of the community have, during the operation of these laws, rapidly amassed enormous fortunes; yet, during the whole period, they could seldom afford either to increase the wages or diminish the toil of these little labourers, to whom, however forgetful they may be of the fact, many of them owe every farthing they possess: they have generally done the reverse. And they talk of Corn Laws as their apology! This is too bad. Can any man be fool enough to suppose that, were the Corn Laws abolished tomorrow, and every grain we consume grown and ground in foreign parts, such individuals would cease to 'grind the forces of the poor?'
... I wish I could bring a group of these little ones to [the] bar [of the House of Commons]‑I am sure their silent appearance would plead more forcibly in their behalf than the loudest eloquence. I shall not soon forget their affecting presence on a recent occasion, when many thousands of the people of the North were assembled in their cause,‑when in the intervals of those loud and general acclamations which rent the air, while their great and unrivalled champion, Richard Oastler (whose name is now lisped by thousands of these infants, and will be transmitted to posterity with undiminished gratitude and affection); ‑when this friend of the factory children was pleading their cause as he alone can plead it, the repeated cheers of a number of shrill voices were heard, which sounded like echoes to our own; and on looking around, we saw several groups of little children, amidst the crowd, who raised their voices in the fervour of hope and exultation, while they heard their sufferings commiserated, and, as they believed, about to be redressed ...